Who Does Not NOT Like Mike?

I often find it mildly embarrassing when there are no posts of any interest in between my weekly dart posts. Seeing as tonight is Monday night, I'll need to act fast to avoid this result. That's why I've decided to make a quick post tonight about. . .

Mike Huckabee.

Out of all of the Republican nominees, I've decided that Mike Huckabee is the one that I fear the most. He's good-natured, he's quick, he's really funny, he's skinny now, he's handsome, he's got executive experience, he's got a rock band, and he's extremely non-threatening when he talks about his radical religious beliefs.

He's also been a governor from a right-leaning state in the South (quasi South?) a fact that has proved helpful in exactly 4 of the last 4 elections.

And that's not all. In every poll that I've seen (one) that asks voters who they would "not NOT vote for," he's number out of all the candidates. That means that nobody really doesn't like him. That's for all the candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike. In politics, what more can you ask for? Somebody like Hillary is at a huge disadvantage because around 49% of the people in the nation say they would never vote for her. This is a statistic (even if I'm embellishing) that Clinton's supporters refuse to acknowledge.

But back to Huckabee. Considering all of these super-great things about Mike Huckabee, I find it not at all surprising that he's streaking to the front of the pack in Iowa. I just saw on Keith Olbermann he was sitting at about 32% in Iowa, well above his closest competitor. I also saw on Keith Olbermann that back about 15 years ago (1992, about the same year that Magic Johnson came out as HIV positive) that Mr. Huckabee seemed to be miffed as to why we weren't "isolating" people who were HIV positive. He used the word plague. When asked about this he claimed he didn't know how the diseases spread back then. Which is odd, because any 12 year old kid knew incredibly well how the disease was transmitted. Ryan White anyone?

So it wasn't to surprising today when I stumbled upon this article from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (billed as Arkansas' Largest Newspaper!). In case you don't have time to read it all, here are a couple great lines from the speech that Huckabee recently gave to an audience of Baptist pastors:

"The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," he said. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior."

"Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does," Huckabee said. "Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed."

Now I'm all for pandering, but this is getting kind of creepy. Government doesn't have the answer but Church does? If we were watching this same speech coming from an Imam in Afghanistan we'd probably find it frightening. We'd wonder why things are so different over there from over here, where the separation of church and state is so firmly established.

So why don't we find it frightening when we hear one of our candidates speaking like this? I think the answer is pretty simple: he's funny, he's quick, he's handsome, and he seems non-threatening.

Which makes me all the more scared.